Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

15 Anton Rubinstein

Ilya Repin, Portrait of the Composer Anton Rubinstein (1887). Oil on canvas, 110 × 85 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Wikimedia Commons. •• • 15 Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) RICHARD STITES Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein (Rubinshtein), although born at the edge of the Russian Empire, a member of a despised people, nonetheless became a central figure in the life of what is, alongside literature, Russia’s first great cultural contribution to the world in the nineteenth century—classical music. Not a great composer, his music falls out the canonical progression that begins with the compositions of Mikhail Glinka (1804–57). Rather he became a world-renowned concert pianist, an aggressive promoter of European art music in Russia, and the founder—against tough odds—of the first Russian conservatory. Rubinstein in many ways always remained a bridge between Russia and Europe, even down to his Jewish roots on both sides. His mother hailed from Silesia, an eastern wing of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father , Russified and a convert to Orthodoxy, came from a town in a corner of Podolia near Bessarabia, recently acquired from the Ottoman Turks—a true borderland where dwelled Ukrainians, Romanians, Russians, Jews, Tatars, Turks, and Greeks. Characteristically, the “western” bride and the “eastern” groom met in Odessa, one of the great crossroads of Europe. Anton’s father, Grigory, did not flee the Jewish Pale to escape pogroms—the hideous massacres that had been the scourge of Jewry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which would explode again in the 1880s. What he gained on that day in 1831 when sixty members of the Rubinstein clan assembled in a church in its ancestral town of Berdichev to be baptized was what all Jews gained upon admission into the Orthodox faith. This included exemption from the 1827 laws on double taxation of Jews and avoidance of the cantonal system which swept Jewish children into the alien realm of the Russian army with all its hazards, brutality, and discrimination —the main scourge of Jewish life under Tsar Nicholas I. Converts also gained the right to make their exit from the Pale, which one scholar has called a huge pressure cooker, and move into the Russian interior, a new world where mere conversion to Orthodoxy could be turned into a life of Russification. Three years after the baptism, Grigory followed one of those thousands of “pathways of empire” that took his family 170 Richard Stites from the ethnic vinaigrette of southern Podolia, to the merchant quarter on the south bank of the Moscow River. The location of Rubinstein’s home and the small factory he owned in the Zamoskvorechie district, at the heart of the Moscow merchantry, helped open to the family a wide diversity of social contacts that lubricated the road to assimilation. This became possible due to two of the father’s assets: personal wealth, which he used to entertain guests lavishly; and a jovial and good-natured personality which attracted to his home not only Russian merchants, but petty nobles, students, and members of the budding intelligentsia. The lively domestic milieu served as a training ground for the kind of social skills needed when Anton began his climb toward—but never quite into—the upper reaches of the beau monde. The boy’s musical training came from his mother, a talented pianist in the strict German style. Throughout Europe in this era, piano lessons had become de rigueur for families of the middle class and upward, but more often for girls than boys. Anton’s innate talent and his mother’s stringent practice regime steered him from the role of a sociable domestic piano player into that of a major concert artist. Happily, the path to this prominence was well prepared. After the specter of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 had faded, European artists whose countrymen had marched with the Grande Armée—Frenchmen, Poles, Italians, and others—swarmed into St. Petersburg and Moscow and even provincial towns to join the international concert circuit. Liszt, Berlioz, the Schumanns, and countless divas and ballerinas accustomed the Russian public to foreign, semi-foreign, and exotic star power. Child prodigies of whatever origin became the rage in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. Since many of them, as well as foreign virtuosi, were Jewish, another door was opened to talented young artists of Jewish background at the very moment when other teenaged unconverted Jews were bent under the stick...